Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Irene's Garden Visit

Irene's visit here was too wet, too windy and entirely too long. We were fortunate, but some of the plants were a bit tangled. Here the golden glows blew down onto the Gloriosa daisies and the anise hyssop.

The buckwheat plants were well stirred.

This Rudabeckia trilobia was really flattened.

The big red hibiscus didn't stand up to the wind. It flattened the flax.

Blown by a strong gust of wind from the north, it toppled onto of the lemon verbena

Ed's tomato bed looked perfectly normal and when we went to bed that night we thought we had been very lucky and that life would be back to normal. Well, we were very lucky! We had no serious damage, but during the night while we were sleeping Irene left us with a not so nice parting gift. When we awoke in the morning we had no power. The Stone Wall Garden is out in the country. We have our own well so without power we have no water.

Ed dragged our 12 year old generator out of its shed and we began our days of trying to keep the food in the freezers from spoiling and pumping just enough water to meet our needs. Things were humming along until the generator wouldn't start . We loaded it into Ed's truck with little hope, but our friends at Norwich Implement said they would try to fix our dinosaur even though old generator parts are impossible to find. Ed backed the truck up to the shop. Four mechanics looked at the generator shaking their heads.'It's old." " It's rusty". were some of the remarks I heard. But one guy said "Maybe you'll be lucky and its just that your balls are stuck!" He went to get a big hammer. He whomped it twice with the hammer and it started on the second pull. That was yesterday and it is still humming today. Today I saw NYSEG and Aspeludh trucks in the neighborhood. At my age I never thought guys in trucks could make my heart beat so fast. It doesn't look like it will happen today, but maybe , maybe tomorrow our power will be back on. I write this now from the library in town. I know one thing I missed the blog!

4 comments:

Glad you are just soggy and wind blown, with no real damages. Being without power is a bummer though. We were without power for 13 days after Wilma blasted us. We were so glad to see those out of state trucks hooking us back up to the power grid.

We did get a generator the last day, because predictions had been that we'd be without power for maybe 6 weeks. The next day power was restored. Glad your old generator is still humming along for you.

I was worried about you and wondering how you faired with Irene. We were wet and windy and lucky to have power. So glad you made it through with little damage. Hopefully your power will be restored soon...

So glad you weathered Irene with minimal damage. Even though we are 3 hours from the gulf coast, when hurricane Opal came our way we had sustained 90 mph winds for 6 hours! We heard the carport roof go and lost massive sycamore limbs in the driveway -- had to crawl out, over and under to the street. It was scarey; We hid in the tub with a mattress! Our city had more damage than the coastline due to rain saturated ground followed by winds. We hope that all continues to improve for everyone up north. Katie